Neglected Morality
by Meresger
Summary: In a world where the fight to survive often means benignly neglected morality, two ex-lovers reunite. A Chameron fic set in the post zombpocalyptic world of The Walking Dead. Bring your Axe-canes!
1. Everybody Dies

HOUSE M.D. / The Walking Dead

"Neglected Morality"

by meresger

Summary: In a world where the fight to survive often means benignly neglected morality, two ex-lovers reunite. A Chameron fic set in the post zombpocalyptic world of _The Walking Dead_. Get out your Axe-canes!

Disclaimer: I don't own _House_ or _The Walking Dead_. If I did, Cameron never would have left, Chase wouldn't have become a dumb whore, Lori would have died in Season 1, Beth would never have existed, that whole annoying mess with the Governor never would have happened, and they would have spent more time with those cannibals after an entire fucking season to get to Terminus!

Chronology mashup: HOUSE ended in April 2013 on the show, 5 months before Wilson's presumed demise in September when Foreman had those fight tickets. From the pilot of TWD and what transpires with Lori's pregnancy, it can be inferred that the first case of Wildfire was around January, it went global about May, and the CDC went boom toward the end of July... which is one hell of a fast-moving pandemic! As such, for this story, Wildefire began in January 2014 and the global outbreak was a year after House's "death". Cameron's son would have been about a year and a half old and Chase would have been running Diagnostics for about a year.

HOUSE chronology: To refresh your memories, the show's events takes place between September 2004, when Foreman joins the team, and April 2013, House's funeral. Chase and Cameron married in April 2009, separated just before Thanksgiving, and signed divorce papers the following March or April. By the end of the series, Cameron was remarried with an infant son, probably born in late 2012 or early 2013, a convenient explanation for Cameron having no involvement in Chase's stabbing storyline.

* * *

Chapter One

Everybody Dies

(June 2014)

Metal chairs sit empty on an open athletic field, but there is no crowd of students in caps and gowns, no family members gathered to cheer on the graduates nor exhausted faculty eager for the reception buffet. The podium stands alone on a stage littered with leaves and bits of crape-paper streamers fallen from their scaffold where a banner proclaiming "Congradulations Graduating Class of 2014" flaps in a lonely breeze.

Beyond the field, the ivy-covered buildings are eerily silent and empty, the only sound the soft rustling of a plastic bag as it's carried by the wind across a wide sidewalk, past dusty bicycles left in their wracks.

The graduates are all gone, never to return for alumni functions, just as the lower classman will never return with backpacks full of books, texting madly about study groups and homework assignments as they crisscrossed the large quads until they too toss their caps into the air.

There will be no more graduating classes at Princeton University.

As few sprinkles of rain fall from the bloated underbellies of gathering clouds, the polymeric tumbleweed is carried onward, through the empty suburbs of Plainsboro, devoid of laughing children and growling lawn mowers, of summer day camp buses and mini-vans loaded for roadtrips and picnics at the lake.

The only buses sit empty, abandoned, on the streets with equally empty mini-vans.

It's as though The Rapture came down and removed every soul, not just the good ones, and left vacant an entire world: the downtown shops and restaurants on the brick-lined streets, the apartment complexes and office buildings where the city rose up from suburban sprawl into man-made canyons once full of activity - full of life.

Now they stand as looming monoliths, lifeless facades - monuments to a dying age, absent their makers and inhabitants both.

It seems at first inexplicable what has happened to Princeton-Plainsboro. Even a neutron bomb would have burned the shadows of the dead into the walls as it incinerated them.

There are no shadows here.

But there are crows.

A noisy flock of them descends upon the evidence of neither a supernatural apocalypse nor nuclear holocaust.

On the running track beside the large brick and masonry facade of a hospital, nestled between a large forest hollow and Lake Carnegie, festers row upon row of white-shrouded corpses.

In the summer heat and humidity the odor of rotting flesh, nauseating, fetid, seeps out of the plastic body bags, carried on the breeze, attracting flies and carrion birds.

Crows.

And the occasional raven.

"Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital" the sign on the edifice proclaims, and perched on the parking space sign for a Dr. Eric Foreman, Dean of Medicine, one of the larger black birds pecks at a pilfered eyeball, the venis fluid gushing milky and thick over a black clawed foot - before a rumbling sound causes the bird to take flight, abandoning its meal to bounce in macabre fashion on the pavement.

The rumble turns into the growl of engines, armored vehicles with "National Guard" scrawled onto their sides, barreling down Plainsboro Road. As the vehicles come to a stop in the hospital's parking lot, a woman in pink scrubs emerges from the glass doors.

Men in body armor carrying assault weapons with extra magazines stuffed into their vests jump down from the safe confines of their MRAP and the woman bounds forward, a relieved look upon her face.

"Thank god, you're here. We've got-"

Bullets strike the nurse in the chest, blood blossoming and spraying, and the doors beyond shattering to dust. Before the nurse has even fallen to the ground, carried several feet by the momentum of the rounds puncturing her body, the men and women, faces obscured by their helmets and goggles, trample past, barking and following orders. One booted foot crushes the eyeball on the way up the cement path to the now gaping maw of the entrance.

Through the shattered front doors they send a second barrage of gunfire to take down the cause of such merciless action: creatures that used to be people,

Walking corpses dressed in scrubs and lab coats with sunken, milky eyes and rotted gums that leak black fluid over gnashing teeth surge toward the soldiers. What started amongst the patients had quickly spread to the health care workers, as pandemics often do, and so the hospitals were left to quarantine themselves - until now.

Now comes the purging.

Behind a glass door labeled "Clinic" with a chain lock wrapped around the handles groan and rasp a horde of more creatures with tightly stretched, discolored flesh, like a mummified corpses left in a desert that remained in an old horror movie and were transplanted into a modern-day hospital - the oldest of the reanimated dead whose bodies are wasting away even as they clamor toward the glass, desperate to get to the living, to spread their disease with the drive of a literally insatiable appetite, never meant to be filled.

One of the soldiers grabs a grenade from his belt, pulls the pin and shouts a loud, "CLEAR!" and then the others scatter, ducking behind the admit desk seconds before there is a massive _BOOM_ and the glass doors are reduced to powder, the former patients behind it ripped to shreds. The few with limbs intact enough to begin staggering out are taken down by flame throwers while a second team raises riffles to pick off those stragglers that crowd to the second floor mezzanine at the sound. As they fall over the railing like jumping lemmings, another team heads upstairs to continue the job, clear the hospital of as many as they can even though it already seems like a futile task.

But the CDC has gone dark, and they don't truly know what they are up against:

 _The Sixth Extinction_.

On the fourth floor, a door shuts, a breath held as the gunfire nears.

This is the story of some of the survivors.

* * *

AN: This is a story that has been sitting incomplete on my hard drive for a long time. I felt the need to at least post an edited form of it.


	2. Don't Fear the Reaper

Chapter Two

Don't Fear the Reaper

(April 2015)

 _All our times have come_

 _Here but now they're gone_

 _Seasons don't fear the reaper_

 _Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain... (we can be like they are)_

 _Come on baby... (don't fear the reaper)_

 _Baby take my hand... (don't fear the reaper)_

 _We'll be able to fly... (don't fear the reaper)_

 _Baby I'm your man..._

Chase looks like a Bedouin as he slows a somewhat battered black and orange motorbike down Main Street, USA somewhere Middle America. Pulling to a stop, he cuts the engine, pulls out his earbuds, and unwinds the scarf that has kept his face warm and his mouth free of whatever bugs are out in the chilly early spring.

In the months since leaving PPTH, Chase has become a nomad, a drifter, a loner, preferring the wilderness that reminds of childhood trips to his uncle's sheep ranch in Brisbane when he could sleep outside under the stars and the sound of his parents' shouting that was his usual lullaby replaced by crickets, nocturnal animals, and the wind rustling the eucalyptus leaves.

The evacuation plan hadn't exactly worked out. From old patient files they'd managed to hold up in that gun-hoarding nutjob's house for awhile, but then the military started burning Trenton and the still-ambulatory Walkers had immediately begun fleeing the civic center for the suburbs - and they were running out of food, something Captain America hadn't stockpiled with his AK-47s and M-16s.

On the flight from New Jersey they'd lost people, added people, lost some of them. In Pennsylvania they tried Amish Country for awhile, but it turned out when the Apocalypse was at hand, the ultra-religious types weren't all that hospitable to blood-spattered, gun-toting outsiders. There were surprise attacks by "lurkers" and ambushes by mobs of Walkers after roadways were found blocked or farms not adequately searched for threats. People were bitten and died. Others were just devoured by starved Walkers.

They lost Foreman, and Chase still isn't certain how to feel about the absence of the man who was never really his friend any more than he has been able to define House's loss in his life - only that there's a certain vulnerability in not having the other man at his back, but yet freeing too to be without his anal-retentive leadership skills.

After that, he'd decided head off on his own rather than staying with the survivors, going in circles in search of the military or some government aid; Adams could continue playing doctor with them, and he could make better time, get farther on his own, on the bike; and the truth was, as much as he appreciated having Annie Oakly around for her prowess with a gun, he'd never liked Adams that much - and the one-time survivor sex had left him feeling dirtier than of his one-night-stands.

At first Chase had headed out with no particular destination other than out west, though he'd ended up in Illinois, the suburb of Chicago where Cameron's parents had lived, where he'd visited them that one Christmas before he proposed. He'd found her father in the backyard, trapped by the fence and her mother in the basement - and stayed there for a few days, making use of the generator, though the damned thing's noise attracted more Walkers than it was worth for the electricity and hot water.

He'd dispatched of his former in-laws before heading to Joliet.

There the fences of the prison seemed to have trapped the living with the dead until they were all dead.

Ultimately, Chase had ended up on Route 66, the roadtrip he'd always wanted to take but never had, and certainly not in this manner. It was far less appealing without when the famous diners were all boarded up and the roadside motels filled with corpses. Mostly, he had to stick to the old segments of the road the highway, the retired portions that were rerouted on the official map and now passed through small towns - or nowhere - instead of the main thoroughfares that were to be avoided as much as possible.

Such detours had brought him to this "one horse" town, the kind that might have been booming at the turn of the previous century and never recovered from the Great Depression with its worn brick buildings that had faded painted signs from bygone eras and a repurposed movie theater that looked like the facade was barely holding up against winter ice storms.

The building he'd pulled up to was once a Wolsworth by the paint on the bricks; and someone had spray over it with "Rev 6: v 9-11".

As Chase sets his pack down, the verses come swiftly to his mind, dredging up the long-retired seminarian:

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, "How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?" Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and brothers who were to be killed as they had been was completed.

He'd always thought Revelation was for shit. He still did. _But there is irony in it now_ , Chase thinks as he picks the lock rather than breaking the window - just in case he needs to lock himself in.

* * *

(Flashback: Summer 2014)

It seems to take hours for the massacre to run its course, for the soldiers to get back into their MRAPs and Hum-Vees and lumber off toward their next target.

When Dr. Robert Chase emerges from the supply closet, he is a picture of exhaustion: blonde hair mussed, his usual biweekly trim lost to the epidemic, dark circles beneath blue-green eyes that are bloodshot from lack of sleep, and blood stains both recent and drying to a muddy brown mar his tan suit pants and wrinkled white dress shirt. This is not what he signed on for when he went into medicine, but then again he only went into medicine on his famous physician father's threats of disinheritance - which Rowan Chase did regardless after his perhaps lucky early death from lung cancer.

Chase ticks off a list in his head of those who have gone head of him: Dr. Lawrence Kutner, Dr. Amber Volakis, Dr. Gregory House, Dr. James Wilson...

And add to that those taken by the Wildfire Pandemic, his life seems to be plagued by death.

Chi Park's blood stains his clothes, attacked by the grandmother she accompanied to the hospital with a raging fever; Chase had always liked Popo. Adams used the gun she brought from home to kill their younger colleague after Park died and reanimated, strapped down inside an MRI, because she hadn't wanted her death to be for nothing. He has no idea what's become of most of his former colleagues who'd left the hospital months or years ago: Taub to New York, Thirteen last sending a postcard from Greece, Masters he hadn't seen since Wilson's funeral late last summer, but she was at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota then. Cameron, Foreman talked to her a week ago when she called; he could have tried calling her himself, but life, death, and his own mixed emotions about his ex-wife had gotten in the way.

With a deep exhale, Chase ignores the pungent sent of gun powder on the short walk to what used to be the Department of Diagnostic Medicine and is now shattered glass walls, tattered vertical blinds, and sofas spilling out their stuffing. The room had seen several redecorations over the years, but seeing the omnipresent white board laying on its side, riddled with bullet holes seems to confirm a certain finality to this. His own office is in a shambles, the glass desk scattered in chunks on the floor, the paper floor lamp shredded like a piñata.

Adjusting the messager bag across his chest, hastily grabbed when the shooting on the ground floor began, Chase bends to retrieve the oversized red and gray tennis ball of unknown origin, affectionately called "Ball-y" by the fellows over the years, though he never did know if House had a name for the thing he played with while ruminating on cases.

For the first time in over a year, Chase is truly angry at his former boss for taking his own life. If anyone could have kept this from getting out of hand, it would have been House. At PPTH, anyway. Beyond the hospital walls, he knows, it was a doomed situation many months ago when the first cases went misdiagnosed amongst the Ebola outbreak until some mutation happened, until it became clear that the virus - or whatever it was - had already circumnavigated the globe and seemingly infected them all; or so had said Dr. Stevens, that epidemiologist dick at the CDC that Foreman had managed to contact before the Centers for Disease Control went on lock-down, cut communications, and just like the NIH and WHO left them all in the dark on what to do.

The sound of footsteps crushing glass cause Chase to startle as he's tucking Ball-y into his bag and he's already pivoting as he stands, a scalpel ready to stab.

It's Foreman whose standing there, expression as inscrutable as ever.

"Woa!" the Dean of Medicine exclaims, stumbling back a step and Chase relaxes.

"You survived," he observes, relieved and surprised, and returns the scalpel to his bag.

His expressionless countenance aside, Foreman looks even more warn thin than Chase with a stained and rumpled dress suit and a week's growth of beard that is entirely unlike the anal retentive neurologist. He has, Chase notes, one of Adam's guns tucked into his belt, and if it weren't for the suit, he could almost imagine a younger Eric in that bad neighborhood of his youth, breaking into houses with his future felon brother - whose fate somewhere in California is as unknown as Chase's sister in Melbourne; the pitfalls of being estranged from family.

Or maybe it's a blessing in the end to have atrophied those connections, those feelings, long before this, Chase thinks.

"No one ever checks the chapel," Foreman replies in a House-like manner. "Adams is rounding up supplies with the others," he amends while clutching a tablet in a leather case, his tablet filled with all of the information they've gathered on the pathogen; AC electricity to charge it is bound to become a rare commodity, but there will be a shitload of available car batteries and out west acres of solar and wind farms... if it's even possible to make it that far into America's Outback with the military roadblocks and growing masses of undead.

That had become the tentative plan: head west, as far from the densely populated state of New Jersey as fast as they could. Find guns and ammo and crossbows at shooting ranges Adams knew of in the upstate area and early model cars without computers that could be more easily repaired. Of course, that was before the National Guard showed up and started exterminating them all.

"There's no reason to stay now," contuse Foreman, "We're gathering out front."

"How many are left?" Chase asks, falling into step and stepping over the bodies of coworkers and patients, trying not to notice which ones actually deserved to die like this.

No. _No one_ deserved to die like this.

Well... maybe Dibala and that serial killer cannibal, but other than that...

"Seven, plus Adams," Foreman answers grimily.

Reaching the ground floor, the sweltering humidity becomes apparent, air spilling in through the shattered front doors. The carnage in the halls of the upper floors is magnified in the atrium with dozens of bodies , some on the floor, others slumped over the admit desk, and everywhere blackened, bloody fragments of what had once occupied the clinic and administrative offices.

In his mind's eye, Chase sees the ghosts of the past, of holiday parties with friends long dead, House punching him in the face for getting a diagnosis, Cameron receiving flowers from that testosterone-charged kid while rebuffing his own advances, the day he left with his box of locker items in a numb sort of daze after House fired him, the poster House made of Wilson's porno "cameo" pasted up over the mural that made everyone smile for a few days...

There were House's antics with toy helicopters and water balloons, arguments with Cuddy, helping Cameron on with her coat after meeting her from the ER, giving a casual wave to Kutner without any idea he was heading home to kill himself, House calling Amber a "cuthroat bitch" every time he found her loitering in wait for Wilson, turning down Adams' proposition for a date, Cameron waiting just inside the clinic doors with divorce papers, doors now as shattered as they were.

There's a twisted poetry to it that House would probably appreciate.

This hospital made them and it also destroyed them, chipped away their hope and idealism, their values and ethics, worked its way into their personal lives and their very beings until they were corrupted, better at the practice of medicine, but worse at the practice of life.

It's not about life anymore, though, or at least the sanctity of it. It's about surviving - and its about ending whatever threatens that deepest evolutionary drive. That, at least, House taught them well, Chase considers as he pauses where a bullet-riddled nurse begins to stir with some poor imitation of life.

As Chase bends to shove a scalpel into her right eye, he knows that he won't be returning here. He'd returned three times before, but this time is different. A paradigm has shifted and this is part of the "Word Before" that has to be left behind if there is any chance of a "World After".

Oddly, there is something freeing in it, he thinks, giving one last glance at the bullet-chipped Latin carved in stone above the entrance: _Omnes te moriturum amant_

Everyone loves you when you are about to die

* * *

AN: The song "Don't Fear (The Reaper)" belongs to Blue Oyster Cult. (You know you gotta have more cowbell!) It was meant to connect with the ravens in the first chapter as an allusion to the Stephen King novel/mini-series _The Stand._


	3. Death Becomes Her

Chapter Three

Death Becomes Her

(April 2015)

 _...And it was clear she couldn't go on_

 _Then the door was open and the wind appeared_

 _The candles blew then disappeared_

 _The curtains flew then he appeared... (saying don't be afraid)_

 _Come on baby..._

The music coming from an old battery-powered boombox fills the farmhouse basement, much to the aggravation of the burly man with deep ebony skin and unflinching eyes who jabs the "Stop" button on the tape deck and announces, "We can't wait any longer. Doc says she's got to do the surgery today."

In the kitchen, Cameron stands uncomfortably at the window washing a coffee cup, trying not to think about the surgery. But there's no other choice. They've run out of magnesium sulfate and the diagnosis of eclampsia is indisputable; it's gotten to the point where the only question - if they wait on the surgery - is whether mother or fetus dies first... and the second option would undoubtedly be gruesome.

As the ragtag members of their group converge in the living room, Cameron looks in at the people who've become her family since the camp in Joliet.

There's Wallace, their defacto leader, a former prison guard there, born and raised in New Lenox, a small suburb, who's gruff, but fair. He often butts heads with Roy, a mechanic and hunter from Saginaw, Michigan who seems intent on wearing his John Deer cap until it falls apart, probably because it either belonged to or was given by someone he'd lost, not that he would ever admit it's more than just "lucky".

Mona, a cab driver who'd grown up on the mean south side of Chicago, seems to have adopted Roy as surrogate big brother to pester, and as he doesn't seem to mind overmuch given their spirited bantering, perhaps she's filled in for that someone, even if her ebony skin and Jackie Brown blaxplotation afro couldn't be more out of sync with Roy's fair complexion and dirty blonde mullet.

Eduardo's from California, the son of migrant farm workers who was studying art on a scholarship at Loyola but has now fallen back on his childhood roots as their resident expert on foraging in forgotten fields and overgrown home gardens... or was until winter arrived.

It's still too early for crops here, though the first buds of spring are starting to come up through the melting snow.

Beno, with receding white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, came to the camp with Roy and a handful of others who were lost there; he's a widowed butcher and muezzin from Deerborn, originally from Iran before the Revolution, who ran a Helal meat market and did the weekend call to prayer at his local mosque where he took refuge during the initial outbreak, and where he lost his daughters, friends, and neighbors when the dead broke through the doors; now, such traditions as the call to prayer would be a call to all Walkers in a ten mile radius that food is served.

Cameron suspects that Beno is sweet on Nancy, a retired CPA whose daughter died of cancer early in the outbreak, leaving her to care for her granddaughter Lauretta who goes by "Lulu" and is now upstairs with Sarah...

Cameron lets out a breath. The baby is all Sarah has left of her fiancé and that life before, and Cameron will fight for her to hold onto that, even if her own chance at salvaging some happiness from tragedy is once more forfeit. Helping others is her coping mechanism during the day, and then late at night, she'll close herself in the bathroom and cry, not for those she's lost, but for the future that will never be, the dream she made so many mistakes and sacrifices trying to achieve that doesn't matter now, and in fact seems rather foolish.

Head of Emergency Medicine, a handsome husband, a cute baby, a house in an affluent suburb. All of it had seemed so important not very long ago. She'd come back to Chicago a complete mess, as bad off if not worse than when her first husband died, and had thrown herself into her work, into rebound relationships, into trying to prove her own self-assessment wrong, prove that she had escaped the sucking blackhole that was Gregory House's affect on the lives and aspirations of all around him.

And for just a little while she'd believed, even with all of the doubts she'd been having. How easy it was after House's funeral and seeing how screwed up the others were: Foreman with the job he always wanted but no family or friends, Taub with two children by two different women, Thirteen withering away in Greece, Chase called the hospital's skank behind his back by his own former colleagues after it took getting stabbed to leave, Cuddy not even there after it took House driving his car into her dining room for her to leave PPTH, and Wilson...

She'd been better than them. She'd still believed at Wilson's funeral when Chase was running Diagnostics and she was pregnant again that she was better than all of them.

The miscarriage a month later now seems like a blessing in disguise.

And that was when the 'perfection' of her marriage had begun to show cracks. Along with her profession.

She'd remained in emergency medicine because it meant never having to make the tough moral choices she'd struggled with in Diagnostics, even though she never stopped missing the puzzles, the adrenaline rush, the challenge. She'd remained in a marriage quickly becoming of easy convenience without passion because it meant never having to worry about being alone.

Cameron's alone now.

She had been right about Joliet.

"We'll get what we can," Wallace pulls Cameron from her thoughts, startling her enough that she almost drops the cup.

As she watches them go, she can hear House's voice in her head telling her: _"Everyone dies alone, some past their time and others before they are born... and there's never any dignity in it."_

There isn't much dignity in life these days either.

* * *

(Flashback: Summer 2014)

A cracked laptop computer screen flickers, the three smiling young faces and one surly-looking older one winking off as the machine dies with an electronic fizzle. The labyrinthine surroundings darken, leaving hardly enough light to see the interior of the ER's WAG room. Shuffling and moaning can be heard and beyond that, high above, the _thump thump thump_ of military helicopters.

Suddenly, a wall of fire explodes inward, blowing the swinging doors off their hinges...

Miles away, Dr. Allison Cameron huddles in the back of a large military truck, a convoy rushing out of the city of Chicago, abandoning tanks - and people. Around her are men and women in fatigues and one army doctor who'd restrained her when she'd struggled, when she'd screamed and cried and demanded they wait for the others at the hospital in the heart of Chicago where she'd been barricaded with her coworkers and _patients_.

In her arms her son sniffles and clings to her bloodstained scrub top, and she murmurs that's okay, that everything will be fine.

She knows it won't be, though, and as the world begins to burn behind them, she wonders at her foolish desperation to have a child, her quick fix of a messed up life for an easygoing guy who was too good, too kind for her, and who paid the price by his damned fool insistence on picking her up for work like he did every Friday even though she'd told him not to.

Another dead husband.

It should probably hurt more than it does, but Cameron just feels numb as she holds her son and cringes away from the walking corpses that flood out of the houses of the pass.

Her brother was in the military. Or was he?

He could be dead. They'd been estranged for so long that she couldn't get through.

Cameron tries not to think of her parents, of that trip to Arlington Heights to check in on them when the didn't answer the phone, hoping it was just the usual snubbing of her calls - because they'd never gotten on well, not since her first marriage, and they'd disagreed with the two that had followed, a straw that broke the proverbial camel's back and was only slightly mended by a grandson they would tell her she'd end up raising alone, or raising at all, because she'd screw it up somehow, either the one to leave or left behind.

A part of her had known it was true, that it wouldn't last, but this wasn't the ending any of them had foreseen.

"We'll be in Joliet in an hour," the medic informs her and she can only nod.

A refugee camp.

 _Nothing good will come out of there_ , she thinks. _Nothing alive_.

But death is an old friend to Cameron, and after years of fighting it, she's found herself, for the first time, grateful for the tragedy of her first marriage and for the lessons House taught her, even if she's only now starting to learn them.


	4. Jarhead

Chapter Four

Jarhead

The sound of internal combustion engines wakes Chase from a hazy dream that slips away before he's removed the baseball cap from over his face and sat upright on the roof of the hardware store. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but after the night's rest interrupted by the rasping of the undead somewhere in the woods near his campsite he's more exhausted than he'd realized and that exhaustion lingers still.

Abandoning his sleeping bag, Chase walks in a crouch to the roof's edge, peering down at the street and the approaching vehicles: an old Chevy pickup a shade lighter than the dirt smearing its hood and a later model silver SUV with a cracked fiberglass bumper. It's been over a month since he encountered anyone; most survivors in this region are probably only just contemplating emerging from their hidey-holes to find new stockpiles of food and perhaps set out for new destinations where the ground has already thawed and vegetable gardens resown on their own begun to propagate a new harvest.

He was never fond of salad at the hospital cafeteria, but after months living on Spam and Spaghetti-O's, the prospect of raiding someone's vegetable garden is almost orgasmic.

As he waits, watching, the cars pass by... then the SUV slows and backs up, and Chase realizes that he's been made. The bike is parked in the alley by the fire escape, and while it might be unobtrusive stripped to its original appearance, the red plastic gas can juxtaposed with its location is a rather obvious indication that it wasn't left behind in the town's evacuation.

His heart speeds up. He's met good people. And not so good people. And while he'd like to think his job made him a pretty good judge of character, that same job has made him uncomfortably aware of how hard it can be to peg a psychopath... and in a world where it's survival of the fittest, one could certainly argue that sociopathy is an evolutionary advantage over the masses who're hindered by emotions and conscience.

The truck keeps going, but two people get out of the SUV, a Caucasian man with a mullet carrying a sawed-off shotgun fixed with a bayonet and an African American woman with a crossbow. The woman heads into the storefront and the man enters the alley. Pulling his own riffle, Chase crawls to the other roof-line, well aware that protecting his property - his means of escape - and his supplies trump the sanctity of a stranger's life, however much that conflicts with his training at seminary and medical school.

Again he waits, watches the man inspect his vehicle - House's vehicle that he got out of police impound a week after the funeral and stowed in a storage locker with boxes of things from his apartment that he and Foreman had cleared out, assumed House's mother would sort through, but apparently she never got around to it either between mourning her son and starting a life with her new husband who'd wanted to take her to see his family in Ireland he'd herd from someone at Wilson's funeral...

Footsteps on gravel cause Chase to tense and before he can move the woman is behind him ordering, "Don't try anything or I'll put an arrow through your head."

He doesn't. After she calls her friend on a walkie-talkie, he obeys when she tells him to turn around slowly, keeping his hands where she can see them and then her mulletted companion is there as well and Chase's wrists are secured with a ziptie behind his back.

"Guilty until proven innocent?" Chase challenges, fainting an American accent, because he's found that gets fewer questions, less suspicions, and he's rather sick of being mistaken for British.

"We're on a mission," says the woman. "Can't take any chances."

"You saw us," the man expounds. "Could track us, pick us off. There's some real sick bastards out there, and we don't have time to figure out which side of the crazy fence you're on."

Chase scoffs a little. "And how do I know you're not on the homicidal side?"

The woman gives a smirking smile. "You don't."

His bedroll is left, but the man grabs his large camping backpack, hauling it downstairs. When they reach the hardware store bellow, the truck is back out front and two men, one black, one Hispanic, are loading rolls of plastic sheeting into the truck's bed. The older of the two who's built like Dr. Thomas, PPTH's (deceased) head of surgery, gives Chase a once over.

"You got a name?"

"Rob," he answers, because it sounds more familiar than 'Robert', even though he'd never gone by the diminutive until real life fell apart and he had to use more than just good cheekbones and a medical degree to ingratiate himself to people - people who weren't (generally) looking for sex. And while his skill-set might be enough to keep him from getting killed by most groups he's come across, it could also get him enslaved by those crazies he has no interest in helping with Dr. Frankenstein-esque experiments on the dead or curing the STDs of ex-con serial rapist gangs.

"Put him in the back," orders the burly man, whose clearly the leader.

The Hispanic man informs while muscling him toward the truck, "I think I saw some painter's lights toward the back."

Ten minutes later, Chase is riding in the bed of the truck with a bicycle chain lock keeping him fastened to a tarp hitch on one end and his jailer with a what looks like a Colt 45 - Adams gave him a crash course in firearms - resting in his lap on the other with rolls of plastic sheeting and two bright yellow portable flood lights with adjustable stands.

"Planning to do some remodeling?" Chase asks.

Instead of answering his question, the man responds, "I'm Wallace. I hope you understand, Rob, that we have to take certain precautions to ensure our safety. When this over, assuming you don't pose an eminent threat, we'll drop you off back at your bike and you can go on your merry way."

"I'd like to take you on your word at that," Chase replies, "but you could just be spouting bullshit en route to serving me up on a spit."

"Winter's over. There's enough wild game around that we don't need to resort to cannibalism," says the man with the mullet.

"Funny," Chase scoffs and Wallace's inscrutable expression reminds him a bit of Foreman, if Foreman was fifteen years older and at least a stone heavier.

They're heading out of town now and turn onto a country road, the opposite end of town from where he came in, though everything looks much the same. Fallow fields with rotting ears of corn on dead stalks, wilted soybeans, abandoned tractors, and rusting irrigation equipment protrude from melting piles of snow, a bit of green here-and-there indicating the change in seasons.

"How'd you end up out here on your own, Rob?" the burly man inquires.

Chase slouches a little, well versed in this interplay, but he's usually the one asking the questions. It's all about sousing out the truth from between the lies, deciding if he's trustworthy or prone to stab them in the back the moment he's set free. Although, at the moment, all of his weapons have been confiscated in the SUV with his pack.

"Same as anyone else, I imagine. My people were attacked back before winter. I was hunting at the time. I made it out, they didn't. Most of the people I've encountered since then aren't the hospitable type, so I've kept to myself."

"I saw your sword. You don't look like a jarhead, son."

Ah, yes, House's father's sword. It was in a cardboard tube with fishing equipment; Chase isn't even sure if his mother would have wanted it, considering all of the affairs she had during her marriage before getting re-hitched to one of her lovers shortly after the man's funeral. It's a moot point now as both of them are probably dead.

"Belonged to a friend. Less conspicuous way of wasting Walkers, even if it gets messy. Of course, traveling alone, no one's going to complain about my hygiene."

"You any good with it?"

He shrugs. He took fencing in college, because his father insisted - and never thought he'd be grateful for that. "Well, I'm still alive."

The SUV turns up ahead onto a dirt driveway and the truck follows, bringing them to an old farmhouse that was probably built in the 1940s and doesn't look to have ever been renovated, which probably means the insulation is crap and the plumbing even worse - but there's a large propane tank hooked up to one side and probably a well, though running any generators to provide power to the pumps would risk attracting Walkers. Storm shutters are closed on both the first and second floor, he would guess as much to keep light in as the dead out, and the larger windows on the ground floor are reinforced with sheets of plywood.

As they pull up to the house a woman with graying hair drawn back into a ponytail emerges, speaking without preamble, "You'd better hurry. Did you get everything on the list?"

"Some of it's second or third choice, but yeah," answers the other woman, popping the SUV's hatch and a slightly plump man with either Arab or South Asian features comes out to help the two women and the truck's driver while Wallace and the guy with the mullet extract Chase from the truck.

During the proceedings, Chase learns names by which to identify his captors. Roy gives him shifty looks while the woman with the crossbow that he calls Mona grabs garbage bags full of whatever they scavenged before ending up the hardware store.

It's all pretty meaningless until he spies a fire extinguisher-sized portable gas canister - not oxygen for emphysema or helium for filling balloons - they're not in a party mood, anyway - but nitrous oxide, a low-grade general anesthetic that must have been taken from a local dental office, and most-likely the boxes of latex gloves and masks that are turned out of the bags onto a dining room table as he's set into a chair, Eduardo/Eddy keeping a close watch, gun in hand, lest Chase try to flee in the ordered chaos of sorting through the loot.

It doesn't take a genius now to put it all together as Wallace, Roy, and Beno bring in the plastic sheeting and flood lamps, setting the latter up with car batteries already prepped with alligator clips to power them and illuminate the space. They're turning this room into an OR. If they hadn't acquired most of the goods before finding him, he might be concerned that they're just very anal-retentive cannibals planning to Dexter him before serving him for dinner.

Before he can consider voicing the observation, though, the floorboards in the hall creak and another person arrives. At first, he doesn't recognize her. Her hair is cut severely short and dark again and her blue-gray eyes hidden behind glasses that catch the light like glowing disks. And she's dressed in a stained pair of jeans, a long-sleeved Kansas Jayhawks shirt, and rubber-soled boots that are not remotely her taste or style of clothing.

For a moment, it's like time has stopped and he isn't even certain his voice comes out loud enough to hear above the sound of unwrapping plastic and tearing duct-tape. "Allison?"


	5. Operation

**WARNING: non-graphic smut ahead!**

* * *

Chapter Five

Operation

Her heart shudders at his voice, the accent that she wouldn't even admit to herself she had missed - missed the way her name sounded from his lips.

"Robert?" It comes out in a hushed, gasp and Cameron isn't even aware of making the conscious decision to move forward, but she finds herself running and Chase pushes himself awkwardly to his feet.

Eduardo intervenes, brandishing his gun and ordering Chase to sit back down. She barrels past the younger man as she closes the distance between them and throws her arms around him in a rush, hiding her face against his shoulder.

Chase wobbles, off-balance, aware that everyone is now staring at them, aware that it has been years since they've been this close, including the awkward embraces at House's and Wilson's funerals. Someone cuts the ziptie on his writs and he adjusts immediately, hugging her back. He can feel her fragility through the cotton and denim, the lost weight when she was always on the slender, almost waifs side and it's like embracing an ethereal spirit. Or a dream. Like she might slip through his fingers and be gone again; he'll wake up on the roof of that hardware store left to wonder if she's out there or dead like so many others. But none of his dreams have been so vivid, the smell of her hair, the softness of her skin, the puff of her breath against his neck.

As she pulls away after a moment, Cameron smiles, the first truly joyful smile since the world went to hell.

"You're alive," she says at last, an absurd statement of reality and doesn't think she has ever been so happy to see anyone in her whole life.

"You're not blonde anymore," he responds, aware the response is stupid, but it's the first thing that comes to mind and it draws a smirking smile.

"Vanity's the first thing to go when zombies take over the world. I can't say I like the beard..."

He returns the smile, scratching at his scruff - and a throat is cleared, causing them to break apart, remembering their audience.

Cameron glances around at the group and introduces, "Robert and I..." She pauses, searches for the words. Ex-husband is accurate, but feels neither appropriate nor right. "We worked together in Princeton." It's the simplest explanation that they had time for. "Worked together at a hospital in New Jersey. He's a surgeon."

"No shit?" Roy remarks. "We go out for plastic wrap and nitrous and just happen to nab your old surgeon friend?"

"Maybe luck is on our side after all," interjects Beno.

Wallace states, "I'd rather believe in modern medicine than luck."

He directs at Cameron, "Unless something's changed, we'd better finish setting this place up."

She nods, then gestures to Chase to follow down the hall, speaking quickly, "Sarah has pre-eclampsia. Thirty-six weeks. No seizures yet or signs of bleeding to indicate placental abruption, but vomiting, headaches, and cortical blindness as of this morning. She also has mild coagulopathy and early signs of liver failure, but it's not irreparable if we can get the placenta out now. The fetus may already have been compromised by intrauterine growth retardation from the toxemic changes. It's difficult to tell without an ultrasound. Have you done any field c-sections?"

"No," answers Chase with a shake of his head as they reach a room, the door slightly open. There's a pregnant woman laying on the bed and a girl sitting in a chair reading a book. "You?"

"I attended one at the refugee camp in Joliet," Cameron says with a grimace. "But it was too late. The fetus had died in-utero. By the time the mother was brought to the infirmary, it was... trying to claw its way out. Even though it was removed with a hysterectomy, because the fetal blood with its heavy viral load... or whatever the hell this is... passed to her via the placenta, she developed a fever within hours and had to be... put down."

"Then we'd better hurry and get this done," Chase states and he amends, "It'd be nice for life to win one after all of the death."

"Death does seem to bring us together, doesn't it?" Cameron sighs, aware as soon as the words are out that it's also what tore them apart, and there's a strange, circular irony in that.

"Death and fighting against it is pretty much all anyone's got now," remarks Chase with a shrug. "We survived. That has to count for something."

He doesn't offer any details, but suspects that she knows he wouldn't be here alone if Foreman had made it, and she doesn't say anything about her husband or son, though the absence of the gold ring on her left hand is as conspicuous as its presence at the funerals that last precipitated their meetings.

Cameron smiles wanly and tells him, "There's a bathroom down the hall to the right. I'll find the soap and scrubs and set up something in the kitchen."

Chase nods and before he heads to get cleaned up, he gives her arm a squeeze. "It's good to see you, Allison."

Her response of, "You too," comes out a choked whisper.

* * *

This is not a world filled with hope.

The surgery is crude, bleak-eyed people who have seen too much blood and death dawning scrubs and gloves to assist in the operation.

Sarah begins hemorrhaging after the fetus is pulled from the gaping maw of her womb and Chase works quickly to transfuse her with blood that Cameron had drawn from one of the group just in case while she tries desperately to get the limp newborn to _breath_.

In the end Chase has no choice but to perform an emergency hysterectomy to stop the bleeding as Sarah's vitals plummet. He manages to keep her heart beating, though her pulse is thready, the toll of the eclampsia already having compromised her systems. She is stable enough, at least, to be moved on a backboard to the downstairs bedroom and hooked up to an IV.

Her son isn't so lucky, the organ damage and oxygen deprivation to severe and long to resuscitate him and everyone turns away, expressions grim but not surprised, and perhaps even ashamedly relieved as the prospect of toting around a newborn in a world where making a sound can get you killed conjures up, at least for Chase, that old episode of M*A*S*H and Hawkeye trying to rewrite his memories, that he hadn't watched a mother snap her crying infants neck to save them from discovery.

It's not a chicken laying limp and blue on the sideboard as Cameron gives a time of death, as if that even matters in this world, but it's a routine, a habit, that gives some order to the chaos.

Chase watches her stand there as the others retreat, gloved hand twitching over the instrument tray, fear, disgust, resignation playing across her pale face.

She never handled death well, particularly babies, that Echo Virus epidemic sticking in his mind as the moment he first realized she'd lost someone and that it had broken her in some, perhaps, unfixable way that House had somehow picked up on, been drawn to in that way he always seemed to know when someone was maladjusted, even if he didn't know exactly how or why.

They'd been each of them mirrors of some warped facet of his own damaged psyche. And Chase had been furious when Cameron had fled, attempting to save herself... anger that had eventually dulled to a bitter ache and envy as he'd encouraged others like Masters and Thirteen to save themselves.

There was no saving from this, though, and they would likely be more damaged before it ended.

Walking up beside her, Chase picks up the scalpel and drives it fast and clean through the stillborn child's mouth, into the amigdala. The brainstem was always the best place to strike, if you could manage it, destroying basic sensory function required to 'reboot' the targeted portals of the cerebral cortex.

He probably should have felt some sorrow for the lost life and what he'd done. There was a time when he'd even administered last rites, said a prayer for the dead if it was his task to do a post mortem. But that was years ago now, his faith tested and shaken until even a lapsed nun had abandoned him to his futile search for meaning and human contact that amounted to something more than a quick fuck with a stranger on a Saturday night.

The scalpel comes free with a faint sucking sound and Cameron strips off her bloody gloves, tossing them in a trash bin as she flees the room so fast she nearly knocks the tray over.

Chase isn't certain whether to follow or not and ends up covering the dead baby with a towel and heading to the kitchen to wash his hands and remove his blood-spattered top.

* * *

It should surprise him when Cameron is suddenly behind him, her reflection caught in the window above the sink and flickering kerosene lamplight and that particular look in her eyes. But it doesn't, because she always dealt with death this way, at least once they became lovers, and Chase had never found reason to object, nor does he now when he turns and she discards her own top, revealing a far more simple and comfortable bra than the girlie ones she always wore back then to tempt him.

Cameron's bra ends up in the sink and their bottoms and underwear join non-OR-approved boots on the floor. Chase lifts her onto the counter and she hisses at the cold Formica against her bare ass and digs her nails into his shoulder blades, panting and gasping as he grunts and gulps in oxygen, some analytical part of his brain concluding that a year on the run from zombies has definitely increased his lung capacity and muscle mass, though in spite of it the exhaustion of the last few days won't do much for his stamina, not that either of them are looking for a tantric experience, and Chase has always known how to facilitate her release, where to stroke his fingers between them, where to pinch just so she falls over the edge.

She does, her face pressed against his shoulder, and he can feel the faint indentation of teeth marks as she tries to muffle her cries, body shuddering against the ugly cabinets.

It should bother him that anyone could walk in here and find them like this, but the anxiety that had plagued him back during their 'courtship', the exhibitionism that had so turned Cameron on by contrast... Chase can't muster the energy to care, and more than likely, everyone knows what they're doing, doesn't buy for a second that they were just coworkers.

And Chase is pretty sure that Cameron's old habit of countering death with a good screw against a hard surface is probably pretty commonplace these days, everyone looking for that feeling of stealing life from the jaws of death without actually having to literally do that.

"Trying to get your friends to quarantine me?" Chase quips as he pulls out and away, half leaning on one of the kitchen chairs because his legs might just give out after all of the riding and walking he's done.

"No, just haven't eaten since breakfast," Cameron returns in jest, getting down from the counter where she's left a sweaty ass print. "Sorry."

"I've had a worse, as you can see," he answers, gesturing to a variety of scares, and she has them too, no longer just the tiny nicks from her dermatologist removing moles. He doesn't comment on the c-section scar visible through the thatch of curls at the apex of her thighs.

"Drink?" she asks, as if they're simply back in the past when post-case coitus was the routine and they raided House's secret stash.


	6. Secret Stash

Chapter Six

Secret Stash

The kitchen is cold, but they don't bother dressing beyond underwear, neither pair of which is in the least bit sexy.

Chase pulls coffee mugs from the dish drainer and Cameron retrieves a bottle of Jim Bean from the cleaning supplies under the sink.

"If working for House taught me anything useful for a post-apocalyptic world, it's where people stash their good stuff," she says.

"And to think it took me years to get you to have a drink with me," Chase remarks as she pours, "and it was months _after_ sleeping with me in inappropriate places."

"And then I married you."

"And then you left me," he reminds, not bitter, just a statement as she takes a seat at the table across from him.

"And divorced you."

"But not before sleeping with me to get me to sign the papers," he points out, something that has always bothered him even as he'd craved that good-bye. "You always did know how to pull my strings to get what you wanted, Allison."

She winces at the implied statement and asks, "And you want to know if I'm pulling them now?"

"Maybe. I don't know," Chase replies. "It's late and I haven't slept more than a few hours in days or slept with anyone since all this shit went down, so I'm not saying I regret it or think you had any ulterior motive yourself, all things considered. I know you have a certain way of coping with losing patients. It hasn't been so long that I don't remember that, and I never thought it was a bad thing, distracting from the inevitability of death by the only other real way of feeling like you're snatching life from the jaws of death without playing God and facing the odds of failure."

"I was that predictable?"

"Not always. Actually, you were the biggest puzzle, and one I never entirely figured out," Chase admits. "Maybe that's what drew me to you, all the contradictory bits and pieces of you."

"All the bits and pieces were that evidence of how messed up I was, you mean," Cameron counters with a grimace.

"I didn't say that."

"I did. I am," she sighs. "Manipulating you to sign those papers, the things that I said in that clinic room, that's all just the broken pieces of me," Cameron admits after taking a sip and grimacing at the string. "The truth is, I've made a lot of bad choices in my life, both work and romance. You got caught up in the middle, and I'm sorry you were hurt."

"Working for House and falling in love with him?" Chase asks, head tipped to the side, wondering.

"You're still on that?" Cameron lets out a breath and rolls her eyes. "Yes, okay, maybe that's part of it, and I didn't mean for you to feel like you were some consolation prize because he rejected me. And that whole 'he knew how to love' spiel I gave at his funeral was bullshit for the sake of the living, for his mother and Wilson, because he only ever seemed to care about himself most of all, and all of the justifications I tried to make to disprove that were more about not facing my own selfishness than anything, refusing to admit not just that working for House changed me in good ways, but that maybe he hired me in the first place because I was more like him than I cared to admit," she explains.

"You think you're like House?" Chase asks, curious after the speech she gave him about being poisoned by House, about how he was toxic and bringing them all down and she had to escape it.

"I believe that I became a better doctor because of him," Cameron shrugs, "though not a better person —because I actually wasn't that good of a person to begin with. In retrospect, I think of all the derisive 'pep talks' House gave me over the years, and I can see now he was trying to make me see who I truly was and either embrace my inner bitch like Amber or actually try to become a better person, to get past all of the hang-ups that made me a jerk so much of the time and figure out how to be well-adjusted... something he never could be. He might not have really cared about us, but he cared about the puzzles getting solved and he surrounded himself with people he wanted to teach how to do that, who could do that without being hampered by all of the crap that had broken him... so he tried to fix us. We were his ultimate puzzles."

"I can see that," Chase considers after a moment of consideration. "A few weeks before he died, House tried to tell me that I hadn't screwed up my life as irrevocably as he had. It was probably the most genuine thing he ever said... so I should have figured something was up with him..."

"Like I should have figured something was up with you after Dibala?" Cameron questions, "but instead I chalked it up to you cheating on me. I was such a selfish person, always making other people's problems about me, about hurting me, just like House apparently did with Cuddy leaving him and Wilson's cancer diagnosis. I projected all kinds of problems from my first marriage on my relationships without admitting that they were problems, that it wasn't the fairy tale I told everyone, that it was just a stupid choice I made when I was young that scarred me for life. I didn't want to face that and it ruined my life in so many ways. I didn't want to admit that Foreman was right, that I didn't really know what commitment and marriage are."

"He told you that?"

"A long time ago," Cameron says with a rueful smile, remembering when they were all young "duckings", "not long after everyone found out about my husband. He said his parents had real love and commitment, that it was standing next to someone brushing your teeth for thirty years. And he tried to soften the blow, saying he knew I was just afraid of commitment, of relationships, because I'd had something real, but I could tell he was being condescending. He thought I was a fool clinging to some childish crush that didn't remotely resemble marriage or love, same as my principles, and maybe I was."

"And you've only now figured he was right?" Chase asks. "Why now?"

"Besides the end of the world?" she replies, lips turning into a smirk and then sighs. "It's easy to talk about morality and the sanctity of human life when you're safe inside a modern hospital with law and protocol to back you up. I knew that there were places in this world filled with malignant immorality, but I didn't want to accept that sometimes, regrettably, perhaps, the only way to deal with that is benignly neglected morality. I clung to my 'insane moral compass' that wouldn't let me lie to anyone about anything, and the truth is, half the time I was always on the fence about whatever I was fighting for, wasn't sure about the soap box I was standing on. And if I slipped and did something that clashed with those loudly shouted principles, then I had to find other justifications for it, blame others, or just deny it. It was never about what you did, not really. And it was never that you didn't have an expiration date or that I didn't love you in the right way."

Shaking her head, Cameron continues more truthful than she's probably ever been, "I told Wilson that I almost had an affair during my first marriage." She pauses, gaging the suprise in Chase's expression. "And even after... when it wouldn't have been wrong, I didn't take that chance, because I didn't think that I could live with myself knowing that I'd wanted to when my husband was still alive. I was looking for some... validation that I'd made the right choice then. But in one of his House-like moments, Wilson called me an idiot. He told me that sometimes things just happen that you don't expect, and it feels right, it makes you feel happy, and maybe it ruins everything you thought was happiness up to then, but you have to take that chance because life is made up moments and if you don't take chances, then you're not really living and you'll always be unhappy."

Cameron refills her mug and concludes, "I didn't want to listen then, but he was saying that if I stuck to my rigid code of morality where love and relationships are concerned, I was going to end up alone. I would never be happy if I wasn't willing to make mistakes. And I wasn't. And I am. Alone."

"I _was_ and I'm alone too," Chase points out. "It's not always an either or. Though, I can't say I made the right choices in those moments, so I'm sure that's part of it. Lot's of emotionally empty sex with strangers to not deal with why I was alone wasn't exactly healthy."

"I guess we're both pretty broken," Cameron sighs.

"You found someone. You got married. Had a baby," he says, wincing even as the words come out, because their absence and her words are confirmation of the worst.

"I did," Cameron states, her expression stoic. "And for all the wrong reasons. I clung to this perfect idea of marriage based on a lie, because the truth is, I look at my twenty-one-year old self I don't even know if I really was in love with him or if I was just —trying to be what he needed me to be. And I let that ruin every relationship I tried to make afterward. Even when I admitted to myself —to you —how that messed me up, how I must have already been messed up to even make that choice, I didn't want to face that I didn't love him in a way that would have worked if he'd survived, because then I was really a mess. So when life threw me the opportunity to have that suburban dream, I took it."

After a sigh, she amends, "I've always been so afraid of failing, my whole life, and giving up was always easier. Giving up on Diagnostics, giving up our marriage, giving up trying to fix myself."

"I didn't bother trying to fix myself either," Chase points out. "I broke free of my father, but then what? I got tied to House. I let our marriage fall apart for that job, and every time I got away I ended up sucked right back in. I took his job-"

"I told you to take it," Cameron reminds. "I told you that you wouldn't become him."

"But I could have. I wasn't in a good place in my life after you left —or before, obviously. I never really found one. I slept around a lot, pretended that I liked it, the whole commitment-free sex bachelor lifestyle, because I realized it was something I could do easily, that women were always looking for a hot doctor with an accent to cross off their list, and people had always assumed I was a player, so no one would ever question if I was unhappy."

"But you were?" Cameron asks, the revelation unsettling. After all, she'd envied Chase being able to walk in and out of relationships like that... even if it was mostly gossip before they started dating... not that she'd known that, which was the reason she'd picked him for a commitment-free relationship.

"House was the only one who noticed," Chase shrugs. "I was snagging free samples of Adavan from the clinic. It was stupid and dangerous and inevitable that something bad would happen. It did. I got stabbed. And House said it was nobody's fault, that I didn't screw up my life, my relationships, in some calculated self-sabotage that he had, but I don't know. Sometimes, when I look at my choices, when I look at us and how long I let myself be used by House, it feels like I did. Or maybe I've just got too much of my father in me."

Cameron folds her arms on the table, regarding Chase with a sad smile. "You're not like either of them. You care about patients. I was wrong when I said you were poisoned. I just... never took the time to realize that you distance yourself the way you do because you care so much. What I said about House at the funeral was a lie, but not for you. I should have seen it sooner, Robert, but I can't... I could never compartmentalize like that and I was blinded by my own... myopic beside manner, I guess. Wilson said it made me a bad doctor, and maybe he was right."

Finishing off her bourbon, she wonders before Chase can comment, "Who knew his cancer diagnosis would end up a blessing in disguise?"

"And House would bail before the biggest puzzle of them all," Chase muses with a frown as she stands to wash out her cup. "Millions of years of evolution, millennia of civilization, we've been to the moon, looked into the very beginnings of the universe —and in two months seven billion humans were reduced to... probably a few million. Mother nature at her most brilliant."

Cameron's eyebrow quirks. " _Now_ you sound like House."

"I did want you to be happy," he suddenly says, not sure why, but it's the truth, and maybe it's just that neither of them was truly honest with each other during their marriage.

"Why?" Cameron asks, the question imbued with genuine surprise. "I left you. I told you I'd never loved you enough. That I was unfixable. And then I ran off to marry another man, have a child, and flaunted that happiness when I saw you again. I was cruel, even if I didn't mean to be. How did you not hate me and want me to fail?"

"I loved you," Chase answers with a shrug and there's a flash of regret and something else in her color-changing eyes.

"You are a good man, Robert," Cameron tells him, laying a hand briefly on his shoulder before heading for the doorway where she pauses to amended, "And what went wrong between us —it wasn't because of what you did."

* * *

AN: "And what's more, it's easy to talk about morality and the sanctity of human life when you're safe inside a modern hospital, with law and protocol to back you up. When the worst thing you might see is a pile-up of cars on the highway. But there are places in this world filled with malignant immorality, and maybe the only way to deal with that is benignly neglected morality."

(Khalehla Rashad, _The Icarus Agenda_ , p. 455)


End file.
